Jive Talks

Announcing Clearspace 2.0 - A Giant Leap for Enterprise Social Productivity

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:15:08 GMT

When we launched Clearspace 1.0 in February of 2007, it was a response to an overwhelming number of enterprise customers saying the same thing: we're stuck between heavyweight collaboration apps (good for file-based workflows, but no one uses them to collaborate) and lightweight Web 2.0 apps like wikis (good for quick adoption, but incomplete, siloed and don't scale). They said, "bring all of these formerly disparate technologies into one system, make it enterprise class, and make it so highly-intuitive that anyone could use it." We did that. And it was very successful.

So now, a little over a year later, and with hundreds of customers under our belt, we're learning a lot. While Clearspace has been very successful as a lightweight way to collaborate and organize content that was historically never captured, there were some consistent issues as our customers tried to get it deployed inside their organization:

How do I drive adoption?
How do I know what to focus on?
How should we manage projects?
How does it work with my Sharepoint content?
How do I involve people outside the firewall?
How do we keep track of changes?

Enter 2.0

The driving force behind the 2.0 release was to take some of these issues head on. A good way to frame the new features (and existing / future features for that matter) is into the big categories of people, focus and work. Here's what we're launching:

People: Expanded profiles and organizational relationships. Find the right people based on the right information, and see exactly where they sit in the organization (full org chart functionality). Plus you can highlight a name and get a mini-profile.

Focus: Personalizable homepage. It's like iGoogle for your work life -- a completely widgitized homepage. No more being overwhelmed by all the content -- now you can provide your own filter to what matters most (what my colleagues are doing, what's popular, my projects, etc.).

Work: Projects, sharing and Sharepoint integration.

Projects: With very few products out there (in between heavyweight project mgmt apps and a spreadsheet), our customers were hungry for the ability to manage projects and coordinate resources at a high level, with features like milestones and tasks.
Sharing: A new cloud-based document sharing service allows you to collaborate with people outside the firewall, even if your software is installed on premise. Your guest user just logs into the service and and can start adding content to your local instance.
Sharepoint Integration: Integration with Sharepoint 2007 allows you to search, browse and link to Sharepoint content from within Clearspace.

There's also a lot of new features under the hood like recording an audit log of actions performed in the admin console, the switch to the Spring and Struts 2, and improvements to the rich text editor. You can learn more in the new Clearspace section of our site.

I've been using the release for a while now, and I'm a huge fan (projects and the widgetized homepage have made the biggest difference in my life). Please download (or test drive online), play around and let us know your thoughts.

New Website

You might also have noticed the new website. Sam, David Greenberg, and team have been hard at work on building a beauty of a site that matches the depth of the new Clearspace release. These guys have done an amazing job and they've been sleeping at the office to get it done. My hats off to them. We would love your feedback on this too, so let us know what you think:

Clearspace 1.x, 2.x, and Jive's New Release Train

marty.kagan@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:17:36 GMT

For my first Jive Talks post, I'd like to talk about some of the changes we're making to the release train in 2008: Internally, we are committed to continuing with an agile development process based on 3 week iterations. At the end of each of these cycles, we will make the current code available as an alpha or beta beta release for developers. Information about how to sign up for the 2.0 Beta Program should be available soon! Externally, we are aiming to launch major/minor releases once a quarter. Clearspace 2.0 has been (and continues to be) an ambitious undertaking, but we're still shooting for a release in early April. Subsequent releases (2.1, 2.2, 2.3) should land in July, October, January, etc. We're looking at adding some very exciting features this year, but I'll let others tell that story...

On the support side, we will continue to provide patch releases for up to 12 months after any major or minor release. These point releases (2.0.1, 2.0.2, etc.) will be reserved strictly for bug fixes, and contain no new functionality. As in the past, these will be released on a 3-week cycle to give the Software Quality Assurance team sufficient time for testing. We've planned for 3-4 scheduled patch releases after every major/minor release. After that, we will do patches on an ad hoc basis to address any severity 1 or 2 issues that may arise.

The 1.x series went into maintenance mode starting with 1.10. There is a 1.10.1 patch release scheduled for next week, and again, we will continue to do patches on an as-needed basis to address critical issues for up to 12 months, after which we will ask customers to upgrade to 2.x, in order to stay on a supported release.

On a personal note, I've been having a great time since joining the Jive development team in November. As you may know, we're doing a lot of hiring this year, and I would love to hear from you if you're interested in joining us!

Clearspace 1.8 Released

greg@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:39:00 GMT

Clearspace 1.8 was released yesterday and includes a couple of new widgets for the customizable space overview page along with a slew of minor improvements and fixes. The two new widgets included are an Activity View of what's going on in a space and a widget for showing the tag groups in a space.

The Activity View widget shows a more detailed listing of what has been happening in the space than the Recent Content widget. It displays an update for each time a comment is posted, each time new content is created or existing content is edited, and each time a poll is created or voted on.

Clearspace 1.6 Released

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:46:15 GMT

We released Clearspace 1.6 last Thursday, and it's got some really nice improvements and new features. I'm personally very excited about customizable spaces. This allows space owners to decide what's important in their space and customize the layout of the "Overview" section. We've found that a lot of our customers are using the main space page as their department's front door and they wanted a lot of flexibility around the content and layout. Be sure to check out the main Clearspace page for more info or watch the short video about the feature.

Another minor new feature is the ability to migrate content back and forth between different databases. This was a pretty highly requested feature from customers. We've had a number of people start an evaluation on the embedded database then want to migrate that to a more production ready database. We added a simple page in the admin console which allows administrators to point to another database and transfer the content.

Finally, a bit of a marketing update: we've refreshed the content on the main Clearspace page and also have a dedicated page up for ClearspaceX, the external community version of Clearspace. Oh, and anyone notice the changes to our front page?

Clearspace 1.5 Released

greg@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:12:35 GMT

Clearspace 1.5 was released today featuring a solid list of improvements. Of note is the ability for blog authors and administrators to edit and delete blog comments from three places: inline in the end-user UI; in the blog management area; and, from the Admin Console. Two new blog-related reports were also added for measuring the number of blog comments and blog trackbacks to the system.

There were many other improvements and bug fixes that you can check out in the changelog.